“Three Artists” Present Different Visions of Nature at Beebe Estate
Drawings by Sydney Smith
“Three Artists” is on display this month at the Beebe Estate, featuring Sydney Smith, Joanne Jolly-Kay, and David Kay, all of whom work out of Porter Mill in Beverly. These artists work in very different media, but their work all centers on nature, presenting the viewer with different ways to think about the world around us.
Photographs by David Kay
In the largest room, Sydney Smith displays a variety of paintings and ink-and-colored-pencil drawings. Smith studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at art school. She worked as a teacher for many years and has only returned to her art more fully since her retirement. In addition to painting and drawing for her own enjoyment, she has also illustrated several self-published children’s books.
On one wall is a series of drawings she made in her sketchbook during the pandemic, which she described as imaginary landscapes based on memories of a friend’s studio in Idaho. “You look down over the Teton Valley and see patterns,” Smith recalled, noting how fields of different crops would appear as different colors from above. “It’s meditative,” Smith said of the coloring process, noting that while someone might buy a coloring book, “I could make my own.” During the pandemic, she shared, “this was my way of getting to different places.” The drawings are striking, with some more map-like and others almost abstract in their colors and patterns.
Smith also shows several paintings of a friend’s garden in late August. “The blooms were all that were left,” she said. “I move a lot when I’m painting the big ones,” Smith explained, which created dynamic brushstrokes that give movement to the shapes in each painting. In one painting, the flowers are etched out in oil pastels, cutting through the softer, almost dreamlike brushstrokes with sharper lines.
Another drawing, which came from a show at Porter Mill focused on Moby Dick, is something Smith describes as “a brand new direction for me.” The swirls of the waves create an interesting effect where the whale might be either above the waves, in front of the ship, or below them, with the waves cutting away to show him. “I felt sympathy for the whale,” Smith said.
In the next room, Joanne Jolly-Kay displays stained glass works, jewelry, and mosaics. She studied sculpture in art school, where she met her husband, David Kay. Jolly-Kay worked as an occupational therapist until her recent retirement.
Jolly-Kay’s two large stained glass pieces as well as several pieces of her jewelry use photographs of herself and of trees near her studio. In the stained glass pieces, the photographs, which she transferred onto glass, form the centerpiece of the work, with roots below the trees and branches above. Her jewelry is a mix of bead work, glass work, and metal clay, which she enjoys pressing textures and cutting shapes into before she fires it and the organic binder fires away, leaving just the metal.
Discussing her eclectic mix of media and forms, Jolly-Kay said “I move around when I get bored.” She is currently focusing on mosaic sculptures, several of which are on display. She creates these sculptures, many of which are in the form of waves, in several layers. The final layer is waterproof grout, which allows them to be hung outside. Her next project, she thinks, will be creating more abstract totems for gardens.
In the final room, David Kay displays photographs of various pieces of nature he brings into his studio. He is both an engineer by training and a professional photographer who has worked on weddings and portraits.
His focus in this exhibition is on branches, leaves, flowers, and other natural items he has collected from his own yard or the Reading Town Forest. “Sometimes I gather 20 things in 50 feet,” he remarked. His close-ups of these natural items invite viewers to consider them in a new light, looking at both flowers and plants we might consider to be weeds with the same focus and interest.
Each artist’s vision of nature - Smith’s soft paintings of gardens and bold landscape drawings; Jolly-Kay’s almost abstract trees and waves in her stained glass and mosaics; and Kay’s close-up photographs of pieces of nature we might overlook - provides viewers with a new insight into the world around us and the way we relate to the natural world.
“Three Artists” is on display at the Beebe Estate on Saturdays in October, 11am-3pm.
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